The Incident Report Read Online Free

I promise you. You wait and see.”
    Ten minutes later he returned. It was a quiet day and nobody had taken his place. The magazine lay where he’d left it. He picked it up and sat down. I continued with my work. We were as before.
    Several more minutes passed.
    â€œMiss, excuse me, Miss, but I’ve been talking with some friends, and I’ve been thinking . . .” He paused long enough to open the magazine wide, and to point with his finger at the sleek naked torso of a muscular male model pressed in upon from all sides byvoluptuous, fawning women. He held up the advertisement to be sure I missed nothing. “My friends and I, we’ve been discussing, and we don’t believe this is really the sort of guy women find attractive, I mean, it’s more what a man thinks that turns women on, it’s more his ideas they go for.”
    He looked me excitedly in the eyes, wanting, it seemed, my agreement.
    â€œOh, yes, absolutely,” I stated.
    He lowered his eyes and scrutinized the advertisement, then looked up again.
    â€œWomen,” he declared, “they get turned on by a man’s ideas, what he thinks. This just isn’t the sort of guy women really want, not women who are a hundred and five, especially not women who are a hundred and five.”
    â€œAre there very many women around who are a hundred and five?” I asked.
    He laughed. “You’re right. I guess there aren’t many around who are a hundred and five. I guess there aren’t.”
    He got up and walked away with languorous ease, his lovely hands thrust deep in his pockets.

INCIDENT REPORT 24
    Once, my father disappeared for three days. I was eleven years old. I listened while my mother telephoned the police to report his absence. She searched his pockets and the drawers of his desk for clues. I asked if he’d been murdered. She assured me, no. He was alive, she insisted, and wandering somewhere, ducking in and out of used-book stores. How did she know? I asked. Had he warned her? Could she promise me he hadn’t accidentally stepped in front of a bus, or fallen down a flight of stairs? She explained that once before, when I was not yet born, he’d vanished, and spent his days of absence frequenting used-book stores. He’d promised her never to do so again. “What good is a promise?” I asked.
    When, after three days, my father returned, my mother behaved as if he were still away. She set four place mats on the table, four bowls, four spoons—the right number for her and for me and my brother and sister. Each time my father apologized, I was reminded of a bird I’d recently seen fly into the glass of a closed window. My fury with my father and my anger with my mother for refusing to forgive him competed with each other.
    Eventually the resentment my mother felt towards my father dissolved and was replaced by fear. I observed her fear. I noted it—the altered shape of her mouth, the invitations turned down, a sudden aversion to buying new clothes for herself, an intensified efficiency which she hoisted like a flag.

INCIDENT REPORT 26
    How old is Nila Narayan? Fifty-five? Her exact age is difficult to determine. Her sleek skin contains her fleshiness, creating an impression of smooth roundness. But her soul is triangular, I’m quite sure of that.
    If one of us, her coworkers, relieves her on desk two minutes late, she relieves that person exactly two minutes late at the first opportunity; and if the schedule offers no such occasion for petty revenge, she alters the schedule to meet her needs. She does not consider herself vengeful but hungry for order and fairness.
    She is indeed hungry. She enquires what each of us intends to eat for lunch, then counts our calories for us. She rearranges the contents of the refrigerator in the staff lounge with the avidity of someone playing solitaire, determined to win.
    At home she cuts out glossy advertisements for men’s